We test whether measures of potential influence on regulators affect stress test outcomes. The large trading banks – those most plausibly ‘Too big to Fail' – face the toughest tests. In contrast, we find no evidence that either political or regulatory connections affect the tests. Stress...

We study investors' reaction to dividend decreases and omissions in the US banking industry during the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008 and compare it to the reaction in the years before and after the crisis. Conducting standard event study approach, we find that investors didn't react...

The issue of bank dividend regulation has become highly controversial as the stress induced on bank capital during the 2008 financial crisis and the covid pandemic created a demand for enhanced regulation and restrictions on bank dividend payments. This paper examines this issue from a...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of dividend-based macroprudential rules in complementing capital requirements to promote bank soundness and sustained lending over the cycle. First, some evidence on bank dividends and earnings in the euro area is presented. When shocks hit their profits,...

Economic literature suggests that banks change their dividend payouts for three main reasons. They may be willing to signal good future profitability to shareholders to address information asymmetry, or use dividends to mitigate the agency costs, or could come under pressure from prudential...

Bank payout policy is strongly affected by regulation and politics, especially for the largest banks. Banks, but not industrial firms, have consistently lower payouts in times of high regulation uncertainty and under democratic presidents. After the Global Financial Crisis, bank regulators'...

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...